The Sanger Institute has been funded by the BBSRC to sequence the genome of Rhizobium leguminosarum, in collaboration with Prof. Peter Young of the Department of Biology, University of York , and Prof. Andy Johnston of the Department of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia.

Rhizobium leguminosarum is a nitrogen-fixing plant symbiont. We have sequenced biovar viciae strain 3841, a spontaneous streptomycin-resistant mutant of strain 300. Further information on the organism and strain is on our collaborators' website.

The sequence and analysis is described in Young et al (2006) Genome Biology 7, r34 and has been submitted to EMBL/GenBank with accession number AM236080.

The finished sequence is available for searching on our Blast Server, or for download from our FTP site.

The genome consists of a circular chromosome of 5,047,142 bp, and six plasmids; pRL12 (870,021 bp), pRL11 (684,202 bp), pRL10 (488,135 bp), pRL9 (352,782 bp), and pRL8 (147,463 bp). The total size is 7,751,309 bp and the averge G+C content is 60.86 %.

The published gene prediction and annotation is available from the FTP site in Artemis format, and these predicted proteins are searchable on the Blast Server The identifiers for individual genes will not change, although some may be added and removed as the annotation is refined.

The annotation for the R. leguminosarum genome is now accessible through GeneDB. GeneDB allows searching, browsing and download of the full annotation.

The shotgun reads are still available: there are 117,680 reads totalling 55.758 Mb and giving a theoretical coverage of 99.92% of the genome.